The Ice Cream That Couldn’t Get Any Love

There is a delightful little ice cream stand in upstate New York called Country Cream (known locally as “The Penguin”). They sell some food too but that’s not really important right now. They have (what I’m told is) a rare machine—though I don’t remember the full story behind it—that can take a block of regular ice cream and turn it into soft serve. Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of soft serve ice cream, mostly because it’s usually so boring. Usually there are three options: chocolate, vanilla, and chocolate/vanilla swirl. Not here though, 52+ flavors, I think in large part to this magical, soft-serve-making, wonder machine…

Alright, enough love for the machine. I was at The Penguin over the summer while visiting my friend Josh’s family’s lakeside campground thing (affectionately known simply as “Camp”). The stand had two signs in their front window that caught my attention.

1) An ad for goose berry ice cream:I appreciate the honesty here, though a bit of a tease. Either you hate it like everyone else does and fit in (but have terrible ice cream) or you love it and are disappointed it’ll never be back again (then buy up all remaining supplies like some kind of addict).

2) An ad for Surprise Me(!) Pints:It doesn’t take a genius to figure this out. Discount ice cream to get rid of the stuff they don’t want. “Ahhh! We accidentally ordered too much popcorn flavored ice cream! Well, better just throw it into some ‘Surprise Me Pints.'” I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of these had the aforementioned goose berry flavor in them.

P. S. So when I originally came up with the idea for popcorn flavored ice cream, I was trying to make a joke about how much people seem to hate popcorn flavored Jelly Belly Jelly Beans. Then I typed “popcorn flavored” into Google and the first suggestion that came up was “popcorn flavored ice cream” and I realized I wasn’t as clever as I thought. To add more confusion, as I read the blog post I linked to above, I realized that a) that ice cream sounds pretty interesting and b) it stated “buttered popcorn is one of the most popular flavors of Jelly Belly’s.” So I went to Jelly Belly’s website and sure enough, those jelly beans are rated 4.7 out of 5!